1. Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to computer systems, and more specifically relates to snapshots in computer systems.
2. Background Art
The combination of hardware and software on a particular computer system defines a computing environment. Different hardware platforms and different operating systems thus provide different computing environments. In recent years, engineers have recognized that it is possible to provide different computing environments on the same physical computer system by logically partitioning the computer system resources to different computing environments, known as virtual machines. The System i computer system developed by IBM is an example of a computer system that supports multiple virtual machines on a single computer system
Snapshots have been used in the prior art to capture state of a computer system, and to store that state for future reference. With the development of virtual machines, snapshots have been applied to virtual machines in the same way as for physical computer systems to indicate state of a virtual machine at a given point in time. A snapshot of a virtual machine allows a user to select and deploy the snapshot, which will create a virtual machine that is representative of the snapshot.
One problem with storing snapshots is the lack of information provided to a user. While the snapshot may include the state of many resources, known snapshots do not reflect which resources are included in a snapshot. A user who is looking at many past snapshots may not know the differences between the snapshots. A user might attempt to remedy this problem by choosing a name for the snapshot that conveys some information about what is in the snapshot. However, a snapshot can include many different computer system resources, so trying to differentiate between snapshots based on their name is not an effective solution. Without a way to display to a user information regarding computer system resources corresponding to stored snapshots, the user will not be able to visually determine differences between snapshots and what is included in snapshots.